Ravi was represented during the trial by attorneys Steven Altman and Philip Nettl of the New Jersey criminal defense law firm Benedict & Altman. The trial lasted 13 days with closing arguments ending on March 13, 2012.
Pretrial motion In August 2011, Ravi's defense attorney requested a
mistrial because the prosecution had not presented evidence to the grand jury which, he argued, would have cleared Ravi, and had presented other evidence in what he said was a misleading manner. This evidence included documents that showed that Clementi had titled files on his computer "Why does it have to be so painful" and took photographs of the George Washington Bridge a month before entering Rutgers. The judge did not grant Ravi's motion. Ravi was not charged with a role in the suicide.
Opening arguments On February 24, 2012, Assistant Prosecutor Julia McClure told jurors that Dharun Ravi acted to "deprive" Tyler Clementi of his "privacy" and "dignity" when he observed an intimate encounter of Clementi and later invited others to watch a second liaison of Clementi and his friend. Ravi's actions were not, she emphasized, a "prank", "accident", or "mistake", but rather were "intentional", "planned", "criminal", and "mean-spirited". She said Ravi was motivated by the fact that Clementi was homosexual: "he sought to brand Tyler as different from everybody else" and "to set him up for contempt." Later, she explained, Ravi tried to "cover up the tracks" of his actions by altering evidence. Defense attorney Steven Altman said that Ravi's actions were those of an "18-year-old boy". He argued that although these actions may have been "immature" and "stupid", they were not hateful, bigoted, or criminal. "There was no bullying," Altman emphasized. Ravi never "harassed", "ridiculed", or even said "anything bad" about his roommate. Moreover, Altman said that Ravi saw only a few seconds of hugging and that nobody "transmitted" or "reproduced any image of anything".
September 19 viewing: Testimony of Rutgers students Wei testified that, shortly after 9 p.m. on September 19, 2010, Dharun Ravi came to Wei's room and within a few minutes he showed her how he could get live images from his room via an auto-accept feature of his computer's video chat. Wei said that both she and Ravi were "shocked" when they saw Clementi and another man leaning against the bed kissing. Wei said that she and Ravi viewed for only a few seconds, turned off the livestream, and initially agreed not to tell anyone, because it "just felt weird" and she felt it was wrong. Several minutes later she chatted about the incident online. Wei said the scene was the same as that before, except that the men's shirts were off. According to one student, the two men were turned so one could not see their faces. Wei and other students testified that Ravi had told them that he was concerned about his possessions. Two of these students testified that Ravi also said he wanted to confirm that his roommate was gay. Several students described Clementi's guest as "shabby" or "shady". The prosecution argued that only Ravi and one other student had seen Clementi's guest in person and that the other student said the guest was not "anything out of the ordinary" and, while older, was "not obscenely old". None of the students said that Ravi had expressed any animosity towards gays. One student said that Ravi had called Clementi "nice", and another said that Ravi had told him he had a gay friend. M.B.'s testimony was important, not only because he himself was an alleged victim, but because the defense had portrayed him as a suspicious character that prompted Ravi's actions. According to former prosecutor John Fahy, it was also important for the prosecution to establish that sexual activity had occurred, and M.B. had to answer specific questions about the nature of that activity.
Kate Zernike of
The New York Times described M.B. as having "close-cropped hair", not dressed as casually as on September 19, 2010, but his "hair and bearing much the same" as in the Rutgers dormitory surveillance camera photo. She wrote that "he did not look, as Mr. Ravi's friends have described him, 'scruffy' or 'shady'." However, M.B. testified that he had not shaved the evening of the encounter. M.B. said that during the September 19 visit he noticed a webcam pointed at Clementi's bed and thought the position "was kind of strange", although he did not think that anyone was actually watching. In cross-examination, he noted he remembered this only when it later became relevant. M.B. also said that when he lay in Clementi's bed, he heard people joking and laughing in the courtyard, and it "seemed like the jokes were at somebody else's expense". When he left the room, there were about five students who "seemed to be looking at me and it seemed kind of unsettling".
September 21: Timeline of Ravi's communications and events Ravi's communications, both in person and in texts and tweets, were key evidence in regard to the September 21 incident. The prosecution contended that on September 21 Ravi set up his webcam to view a second tryst of Clementi's and advertised it to friends and Twitter followers. The viewing was thwarted, they argued, only because Clementi unplugged the computer. Ravi said that his messages were made in a joking manner and that he later turned off the webcam so that no viewing would occur. Tyler Clementi followed Ravi's Twitter messages, visiting Ravi's Twitter page 38 times on the two days before his suicide. Clementi saved two of the messages. On September 20, Clementi saw the first message, which Ravi had made a few minutes after the September 19 viewing, and Clementi discussed it with friends. Ravi wrote: "Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into Molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay." The second saved message was sent by Ravi at 6:39 p.m. on September 21, after Clementi requested private use of the room for another tryst late that afternoon: "Anyone with i-chat, I dare you to video chat me between 9:30 and 12. Yes, it's happening again." On the afternoon of September 21, Ravi texted his friend Michelle Huang. Ravi said that Clementi's guest "was older and creepy and def from the internet". He said he had not seen the guest since September 19, but "My webcam checks my bed hahaha. I got so creeped out after Sunday." He then added, "Yeah keep the gays away." At 8:41, in another text conversation, Ravi told Huang that "people are having a viewing party" with rum and beer. Two Rutgers students testified that Ravi, in an apparent test of his webcam, used computers in their rooms to connect to his own. A Rutgers information technology analyst reported that iChat connections were made with Ravi's computer from these students' computers at 6:58 and 7:44 p.m. on September 21. The second student said that after dinner Ravi "hyped up" his earlier "dare you" tweet, that Ravi used her computer to access his iChat, and that "Tyler's side of the room came into view" when the webcam was accessed. The first student said that the next day he told Ravi that the livestream had not worked: "Then I saw [Ravi] in the lounge and I said, 'Yo, it didn't work.' And he said, 'Yeah, I have been getting that from a lot of people. At 9:15 p.m., Clementi saved a
screenshot of Ravi's "dare you to video chat me" tweet. At 9:25, Ravi's computer was disconnected, according to analysis by the Rutgers IT expert, and it stayed disconnected till 11:19 p.m. Shortly after 11 p.m., Ravi texted Clementi to see if he was still using the room. At 11:48, Clementi texted Ravi that "we're done."
Clementi's complaints to Rutgers officials Only a portion of Clementi's requests for a room change were permitted to be seen by the jury. After discussing with friends Ravi's first Twitter message ("saw my roommate making out with a dude"), Clementi, at 3:55 a.m. on September 21, filed a request on the Rutgers housing website; he wrote, "roommate used webcam to spy on me/want a single room." The part about spying was ruled hearsay and not admissible. Late on the evening of September 21, after seeing Ravi's "dare you" tweet and just before his meeting with M.B., Clementi visited a resident assistant, Rahi Grover. Grover was not permitted to testify about what Clementi said, but did testify about Clementi's demeanor. He said that Clementi's voice was "a little shaky" and that he appeared uncomfortable. The judge allowed some parts of Grover's official report of the incident: "Tyler is quite upset and feels uncomfortable. Tyler prefers some sort of roommate switch ASAP and prefers some sort of punishment for Dharun Ravi." Grover also included his own recommendation that a roommate change be made as soon as possible, and he offered Clementi a bed in his own room for that night, which Clementi declined. According to former prosecutor John Fahy, Clementi's e-mail and Grover's testimony were important in regard to whether or not Clementi "reasonably believed he was being intimidated".
Reactions to prosecution Observers who commented after the prosecution rested its case, and before the defense brought its arguments, differed on the strength of the prosecution's case. Susan Abraham, a law professor and former public defender, said that she believed that the prosecution had established both the invasion of privacy and the bias intimidation charges. There is "no question", she said, that Clementi believed he was selected because of his sexual orientation, and some of Ravi's messages referring to gays might also be evidence of intent; she noted that, under the New Jersey bias intimidation law, the prosecution does not have to prove a biased intent, but only a reasonable belief by the victim that he was targeted because of sexual orientation. Abraham also guessed that one defense argument would be that, when Ravi admitted to violating privacy in his statements to the police, he did not understand the legal meaning of "invasion of privacy" and made the statement under duress. After the indictments, attorney Edward Weinstein had said that the prosecution case might be weak, but after hearing the prosecution case, he concluded that "The defense has an extremely large burden; the prosecution put on a good case." He noted that Ravi's Twitter messages, revealed during the trial, showed that "he was not just a mischievous kid pulling a prank", though he also felt that the outcome of the case "totally remains to be seen".
Jack Levin, an authority on hate crimes, was skeptical of the case for bias intimidation, saying of Ravi that "it becomes difficult to determine whether the motivation was due to sexual orientation or some other conflicts between the roommates that have nothing to do with sexual orientation", although he also noted that the position of the camera had raised doubts about Ravi's contention that he was primarily concerned about protecting his possessions. John Fahy, a former Bergen County Prosecutor, said after closing arguments that both the defense and prosecution did a "very good job". In regard to the invasion of privacy charge, Fahy said the defense was effective in raising reasonable doubt by characterizing the incidents as a "frolic" of "first-year college students". Regarding bias intimidation, Fahy said that there was "not a lot of proof" that the viewing was done because Clementi was gay. In regard to obstruction of justice, Fahy noted that a few texts by Ravi were "very difficult to explain". Fahy said that the police interview revealed a "kid not used to being interrogated" and that the interview contained "one big lie" by Ravi—that in the second (September 21) incident he had "turned the computer off and later turned it on." == Verdict ==